Maria-Elena studied Biology at the Faculty of Sciences of the UNAM, Mexico and obtained her Ph.D at the Institut Pasteur in Paris. She was a postdoctoral fellow at The Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge and started her own lab in Strasbourg in 2009. She moved to Munich in 2016, where she is the Director of the Institute of Epigenetics & Stem Cells at Helmholtz Munich and is Professor of Stem Cell Biology at the LMU University. Maria-Elena鈥檚 research has been devoted to unravelling the epigenetic mechanisms behind cellular plasticity and cell fate. Her team combines high-resolution microscopy, single-cell and low-input genomic approaches with functional perturbations to study the epigenetic principles underlying cellular reprogramming and the establishment of totipotency in the early mouse embryo. Maria-Elena has received several prizes for her contributions of her work on stem cell, development and epigenetics fields. She was selected as Outstanding Young Scientist by the World Economic Forum, she is elected EMBO member and a member of the Academia Europea.